Eleven Days

by Donald Harstad

  “We don’t think he needs a ambulance, ma’am,” said Jacob, politely, “I saw ’em shoot him just about right smack in front of me. We went back up there. He’s still laying there just like they left him. He’s awful dead, we’re pretty sure.”

  I suspect, even in departments where they have two or three hundred homicides a year, the adrenaline still flows with a call like that. In our case, with maybe one or two a year, the rush is remarkable. Hester and I headed out the door.

  As we left, I said, “On the way. Backup, please.”

  Sally waved absently. She knew her job, and would have everything she could drum up out to help as soon as possible. You just like to remind even the best Dispatchers, in case something slips their mind.

  The Heinman brothers were known throughout the area as the “Heinman boys.” Confirmed bachelors, neither of the so-called boys was a day under eighty, and you couldn’t excite either of them if you set his foot on fire. Or, apparently, if you shot somebody right in front of him. As I got in my unmarked patrol car, started the engine, and strapped on the seat belt, I could hear Sally telling a State Trooper whose call numbers I missed that she was looking the directions up in her plat book. Frog Hollow was an old place-name for a very remote stretch of road about two miles long that wound down through a deep, mile-long valley where there were just two farms. I don’t think anybody except the rural mail carrier and the milk truck went there in the daytime, and just kids parking and drinking beer ended up there at night. Sally probably had a general idea where it was, but considering there were more than 2,000 farms in Nation County, this would be ho time to guess and end up giving the Trooper bad directions. Hester, behind me in her own unmarked car, couldn’t possibly know where we were going and was going to have to follow me to the scene. Her call sign was I-388, so I waited until the radio traffic between Sally and the Trooper paused, and picked up my mike.

  “Three and I-388 are 10–76,” I said. That meant we were heading to the scene, and was meant as much for the case record as anything else. You always need times. “Which Trooper you sending?”

  “216 is south of you, I’m working on the directions …” There was no stress in her voice, but I could tell she was really concentrating. “Be aware I’ve confirmed there at least two suspects. Repeating, at least two suspects.”

  Two for sure. That always meant, to my mildly paranoid mind, that we were talking a minimum of two. Okay. Well, there was Hester, me, and 216. Fair odds, as 216 was a new State Trooper sergeant named Gary Beckman, who’d transferred into our area about six months ago. He was about forty, and really knew his stuff.

  “I’ll direct him,” I said so she could forget the directions for him and concentrate on getting an ambulance and our Sheriff notified. “216 from Nation County Three, what’s your 10–20?” I needed to know Gary’s location before I could give him directions. I also needed to find out where he was because we were both going to be in a hurry, and it would be extremely embarrassing if we were to find ourselves trying to occupy the same piece of roadway at the same time.

  “I’m four south of Maitland on Highway 14, Three.” I could hear the roar of his engine over his siren noise. He was moving right along. Hester and I pulled out onto the main highway and headed south. The Trooper was four miles closer than we were. There was no way I’d be able to have him just follow me and skip the directions over the radio.

  “10–4, 216. We’re just leaving Maitland now. Okay, uh, if you turn right at the big dairy farm with the three blue silos, take the next right, and, uh, continue on down a long, winding road into the valley. That’s the right road, and the farm you’re going to is the second one.”

  “10–4, Three.” His siren was making a racket in the background. My siren was making a racket under my hood. Hester’s siren was making a racket behind me. I reached down and turned the volume way up on my radio.

  “Okay, and the, uh, subject is right in the roadway, so …” The last thing I wanted was for a car to run over the victim. “And Comm confirms two suspects.”

  “Understood.”

  I hoped so. After 216 and I shut up, I heard Sally talking to our Sheriff, Lamar Ridgeway, whose call sign was Nation County One. From listening to their radio traffic, I could tell Lamar was a good ten miles north of me. Since he drove the Department’s four-wheel-drive pickup, he wasn’t going to be able to make more than eighty or so. Which begged a question …

  I called Sally. “Comm, Three?”

  “Three, go.”

  “Subject say whether or not the bad guys were still there?”

  “Negative, not there. Repeating, the caller says the suspects have fled the immediate scene. He thinks they went southbound from near his residence, but he didn’t get a vehicle description … just heard it leave, as it apparently was around the curve from his place, and out of his line of sight.”

  Great. “Give what you got to Battenberg PD …” The town of Battenberg was about five miles south of the Heinman boys’ farm, and their officer could at least say who came into town from the north. Assuming that the suspects continued that way.

  “He’s already on the phone.” Sally sounded a bit irritated. I wisely decided to stop interfering and let her do her job.

  It had taken us about three minutes to cover the four miles to the cluster of three blue silos, and I braked hard to slow enough to make the right turn onto the gravel. I anticipated because I knew the road. Hester, who didn’t, just about ended up in my trunk.

  “Could we use our turn signals?” came crackling over the radio.

  “10–4, I-388,” I said to her. “Sorry ’bout that.”

  We were having a pretty mild winter so far, and there was no snow at all on the roadway. Just loose gravel. Almost as bad as ice and snow, if you oversped it. Without snow cover, though, there was much better traction. There was also a lot of dust from 216. Another reason I was unhappy he was ahead of me. Hester, behind both of us, had to back off quite a distance just to be able to see.

  At that point, I heard “216 is 10–23” come calmly over the radio as the sergeant told Comm that he had arrived at the scene. After a beat, he said, “The scene is secure.”

  That meant that there was no suspect at the scene who was not in custody. Good to know, as it tended to affect how you got out of your car. Hester and I both shut down the sirens as soon as he said that.

  I almost missed the next right due to the dust. It was just over the crest of a hill, and judging from the deep parallel furrows in the gravel, 216 had almost missed it, too. I was in an increasingly thick dust cloud for almost a minute, and when it tapered off suddenly I knew I was at the point where 216 had slowed. Seconds later, I rounded a downhill curve and saw the Trooper’s car about fifty yards ahead, parked in the center of the roadway, top lights flashing. Excellent choice, as he was completely protecting the scene. Nobody could get by him on an eighteen-foot road with a bluff on one side and a deep ditch on the other. I stopped near the right-hand ditch, and waited until I saw Hester in my rearview mirror.

  “You go on up,” I said on the radio, “I’ll make sure nobody hits us,” and then carefully backed up around the curve until I was sure somebody cresting the hill could see the flashing lights in my rear window before they got into the curve. This was no time to get run over by an ambulance. Or the Sheriff. “Comm, Three and I-388 are 10–23.” I hung up the mike, grabbed my walkie-talkie, and opened my car door.

  Sally’s acknowledging “10–4, Three” just about blew me out of the car. I’d forgotten about cranking up the volume in order to hear over the sirens. I took a second to turn it way down, and then got out of the car, locked it up, and headed toward the scene. You always leave the engine running in the winter so radio traffic doesn’t run down your battery. It’s also a good idea to have at least three sets of keys.

  The Heinman farm sat well below road level, about fifty yards to my left. On my right, a steeply sloped, heavily wooded hill rose maybe a hundred feet above the roadbe
d. The farm lane came uphill toward the mailbox at a slant, with bare-limbed maple trees between it and the road. As an added measure, between the road and those trees was an old woven wire fence, covered with thick, entangled brush and weeds. Done, I was sure, to keep the larger debris from the roadway out of the Heinman property. There was a Ford tractor from the 50s quietly decomposing within ten feet of the galvanized mailbox that was perched on top of a wooden fencepost. That old tractor had been there the very first time I’d seen the farm, nearly twenty-five years ago. By now it and its rotting tires had become part of the landscape.

  I saw Hester and 216 talking to the two elderly Heinman brothers. They were near the mailbox, looking toward the area ahead of his patrol car. As I approached, a body came slowly into my view in front of 216’s car. It was lying kind of on its left side, parallel with the direction of the road, with its feet pointing away and downhill from me. I started making mental notes as I walked. Faded blue plaid flannel shirt, blue jeans, one black tennis shoe … and hands bound behind its back with yellow plastic binders. Damn. We called them Flex Cuffs, and used them when we ran out of handcuffs. They were like the bindings for electrical wiring. Once they were on, they had to be cut off. What we had here was an execution.

  Two more steps, and I saw the head. More accurately, I saw the remains of the head. You often hear the phrase “blow their head off,” but it’s rare to actually see it.

  Hester and 216 joined me at the body.

  “Hi, Carl,” said Trooper 216.

  “Gary. Glad you could come.”

  “Notice the hands?”

  “Right away,” I said. “One shoe. And the head … or what used to be the head.” From what I could see, the head from about the ears on up was gone. Although nearly all the bones of the cranium seemed gone, lots of skin was left, and had sort of flapped around back into the cavity. One ear, still attached to the neck by a flap of flesh, seemed to be perfectly intact. Seeing things like that has always had kind of a sense of unreality about it.

  “Uh, yeah,” said Gary. “Used to be is right. I think I’m parked over the top of some, uh, debris, from the head and stuff. I didn’t even see it until I was just about stopped.”

  “Okay.” His car was about fifteen feet from the top of the body’s head, and still running. That was fine. We could have him move his car back when the crime lab got there.

  Hester spoke to him. “Doesn’t leak oil, does it?”

  He looked offended. “No.”

  “Just checking.” She smiled. “Wouldn’t want oil all over the … debris. Just make sure your defroster or air conditioner’s off. It’s a lot easier if we don’t get condensed moisture on the stuff.”

  “Right. Uh, you two better talk to the two old boys over there. Very interesting stuff.”

  “Just a few seconds more,” I said. “Tell ’em we’ll be right there.”

  Hester and I just stood and looked at the scene. You only get one chance to see it in a relatively undisturbed state, and I’ve learned to take in as much of it as I can when I have the chance. An ambience sort of thing, you might say. You try to see, smell, and hear as much as you can. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t. But if you don’t do it, you always seem to regret it later in the case.

  A sound was the first thing that struck me. The Heinman brothers had some galvanized-steel hog feeders near the roadway. Looking like huge metal mushrooms, they had spring-loaded covers on them, and every time a hog wanted to eat, all he had to do was press his snout into the mechanism and open it. When he was done, out came the snout, and that spring-loaded lid slammed down with a loud clank. Usually two or three clanks, in fact. One, a beat, and then two very close together. All the time we were at the crime scene, those hog feeders made a constant racket in the background.

  Bodies look smaller dead than they do when they’re alive. This one was no exception, and it wasn’t just the fact that he was half a head shorter, so to speak. Even with the legs straightened out, he’d probably only be about five three or five four. It was sobering to see this wreck of a corpse, and think that he’d been alive and well only a few minutes before. I looked around for his other shoe, but didn’t see it.

  “Sure looks dead,” I said.

  “You must be a detective,” said Hester.